This project will examine the extent to which the welfare policy in the United States affects child well-being. The investigators will focus on four programs: Aid for Families with Dependent Children, Food Stamps, Medicaid, and Head Start. Indicators of child well-being will include child health, as measured by birthweight and anthropometrics; access to and use of medical care; measures of cognitive development, including psychometric tests; and educational attainment. The research will be conducted within the context of an economic model of household decision making that treats the decision to enroll into one or more of these welfare programs as a choice. Special attention will be paid to issues of causality and selection, and a series of different assumptions will be made about the role of unobservables in the models. Three classes of models will be estimated: reduced form models that measure the """"""""total"""""""" effect of programs; instrumental variables models along with models of multiple program participation; and models that include family or child fixed effects. The results will be evaluated in the light of the assumptions underlying each of the models. The investigators will determine whether the effect of welfare programs differs depending on the race and ethnicity, age and gender of the child. Preliminary evidence suggests there are important differences in the impact of programs on African-Americans relative to whites: a series of hypotheses that may explain this observation will be examined in detail. The primary data source will be the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, along with six waves of the Child Mother supplement which span the period 1986 through 1996. These data will be supplemented with county and state level information on public programs and community resources.
